Philip Kapleau: the Three Pillars Of
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ROSHI PHILIP KAPLEAU THE THREE PILLARS OF ZEN Roshi Philip Kapleau, founder of the Zen Center in Rochester, New York, is the author of Zen: Merging of East and West (formerly Zen: Dawn in the West), To Cherish All Life, The Wheel of Death, and The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (formerly The Wheel of Life and Death). In his youth, Kapleau studied law and became a court reporter, serving for many years in the state and federal courts of Connecticut. At the end of World War II he was appointed chief reporter for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, then was sent to cover the the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. In 1953 he gave up his business in America and left for Japan to undergo Zen training. After ve years he came to an awakening, then went on to complete eight more years of formal study and training. He was ordained by his teacher, Zen master Yasutani, during that time, and was authorized by him to teach. Kapleau returned to the United States in 1966 to found the Zen Center in Rochester. The Center has since grown to include aliated centers in a number of cities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Central America. In 1986, after twenty years as Abbot, Kapleau transmitted the teaching to the Ven. Bodhin Kjolhede and appointed him his Dharma- successor. Roshi Philip Kapleau is now retired and lives at the Rochester Zen Center. OTHER BOOKS BY ROSHI PHILIP KAPLEAU The Zen of Living and Dying: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (formerly The Wheel of Life and Death) The Wheel of Death To Cherish All Life: A Buddhist Case for Vegetarianism Zen: Merging of East and West (formerly Zen: Dawn in the West) ANCHOR BOOKS EDITIONS, 1989, 2000 Copyright © 1980 by The Zen Center, Inc. Copyright © 1965, 1989 by Roshi Philip Kapleau Afterword © 2000 by Bodhin Kjolhede All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by John Weatherhill, Inc., in 1965. The Anchor Books edition, rst published in 1980 and then again, in 1989 in a twenty-fth anniversary edition, is a revised and expanded edition of the original. Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The three pillars of Zen / [compiled and edited by] Philip Kapleau. p. cm. Includes translations from Zen masters. 1. Zen Buddhism. I. Kapleau, Philip, 1912– BQ9265.4T48 294.3′927—dc19 0-385-26093-8 eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-76357-0 Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas Author photo © Casey Frank www.anchorbooks.com A note on the decorations: The section-heading devices, dating from about one to ve centuries ago, are kao, the fanciful brush-drawn “signatures” or personal ciphers that were often adopted by Zen priests and other cultured Japanese in their literary and artistic avocations. Kao were only vaguely related to orthography and are used here, not for meaning, but abstractly, for their decorative quality. On the title page is the kao of Butcho-kokushi, a seventeenth- century Zen master. v3.1 Dedicated with respect and gratitude to my teachers: Harada-roshi, Yasutani-roshi, and Nakagawa-roshi, all of whom selessly taught the truth of the Dharma for the welfare of all beings. CONTENTS Cover About the Author Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Foreword, by Huston Smith Editor’s Preface PART ONE • TEACHING AND PRACTICE I YASUTANI-ROSHI’S INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON ZEN TRAINING Editor’s Introduction A Biographical Note on Yasutani-roshi The Lectures 1 Theory and Practice of Zazen 2 Precautions to Observe in Zazen 3 Illusory Visions and Sensations 4 The Five Varieties of Zen 5 The Three Aims of Zazen 6 Individual Instruction 7 Shikan-Taza 8 The Parable of Enyadatta 9 Cause and Eect are One 10 Oneness and Manyness 11 The Three Essentials of Zen Practice 12 Aspiration II YASUTANI-ROSHI’S COMMENTARY (TEISHO) ON THE KOAN MU Editor’s Introduction The Commentary III YASUTANI-ROSHI’S PRIVATE ENCOUNTERS WITH TEN WESTERNERS Editor’s Introduction The Encounters 1 Student A (Woman, Age 60) 2 Student B (Man, Age 45) 3 Student C (Man, Age 43) 4 Student D (Woman, Age 40) 5 Student E (Man, Age 44) 6 Student F (Woman, Age 45) 7 Student G (Man, Age 25) 8 Student H (Woman, Age 37) 9 Student I (Man, Age 30) 10 Student J (Woman, Age 33) IV BASSUI’S DHARMA TALK ON ONE-MIND AND LETTERS TO HIS DISCIPLES Editor’s Introduction The Talk The Letters 1 To a Man from Kumasaka 2 To the Abbess of Shinryu-Ji 3 To Lord Nakamura, Governor of Aki Province 4 To a Dying Man 5 To the Layman Ippo (Homma Shoken) 6 To a Monk in Shobo Hermitage (at his urgent request) 7 To the Nun Furusawa 8 First Letter to the Zen Priest Iguchi 9 Second Letter to the Zen Priest Iguchi 10 Third Letter to the Zen Priest Iguchi 11 Fourth Letter to the Zen Priest Iguchi 12 To a Nun PART Two • ENLIGHTENMENT V EIGHT CONTEMPORARY ENLIGHTENMENT EXPERIENCES OF JAPANESE AND WESTERNERS Editor’s Introduction The Experiences 1 Mr. K. Y., a Japanese Executive, Age 47 2 Mr. P. K., an American Ex-Businessman, Age 46 3 Mr. K. T., a Japanese Garden Designer, Age 32 4 Mr. C. S., a Japanese Retired Government Worker, Age 60 5 Mrs. A. M., an American Schoolteacher, Age 38 6 Mr. A. K., a Japanese Insurance Adjuster, Age 25 7 Mrs. L. T. S., an American Artist, Age 51 8 Mrs. D. K., a Canadian Housewife, Age 35 VI YAEKO IWASAKI’S ENLIGHTENMENT LETTERS TO HARADA-ROSHI AND HIS COMMENTS Editor’s Introduction A Biographical Note on Harada-roshi The Letters and Comments 1 Evidence of Kensho 2 Evidence of Great Enlightenment 3 Evidence of Deepened Enlightenment 4 Evidence of Direct Experience of the Great Way of Buddhism 5 Evidence of Attaining the Non-Regressing Mind of Fugen 6 Evidence of the Joy and Peace of Being at One with the Dharma 7 Further Evidence of the Joy and Peace of Being at One with the Dharma 8 Presentiment of Death PART THREE • SUPPLEMENTS VII DOGEN ON “BEING-TIME” VIII THE TEN OXHERDING PICTURES WITH COMMENTARY AND VERSE IX POSTURES A Zazen Postures Illustrated B Questions and Answers Afterword by Bodhin Kjolhede, Abbot of the Rochester Zen Center Notes on the Anniversary Edition by Kenneth Kraft Notes on Zen Vocabulary and Buddhist Doctrine Pronunciation Guide to Japanese Words Photo Insert FOREWORD TRADITION HAS IT that it was in the sixth century A.D., with the journey of Bodhidharma from India to China, that Zen Buddhism rst moved east. Six hundred years later, in the twelfth century, it traveled east again, to Japan. Now that more than another six hundred years have elapsed, is it to take a third giant stride eastward, this time to the West? No one knows. Current Western interest in Zen wears the guise of the fad it in part is, but the interest also runs deeper. Let me cite the impression Zen has made on three Western minds of some note, those of a psychologist, a philosopher, and a historian. The book C. G. Jung was reading on his deathbed was Charles Luk’s Ch’an and Zen Teachings: First Series, and he expressly asked his secretary to write to tell the author that “he was enthusiastic … When he read what Hsu Yun said, he sometimes felt as if he himself could have said exactly this! It was just ‘it’!”1 In philosophy, Martin Heidegger is quoted as saying: “If I understand [Dr. Suzuki] correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.”2 Lynn White is not the molder of modern thought that Jung and Heidegger have been, but he is a ne historian, and he predicts: “It may well be that the publication of D. T. Suzuki’s rst Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem in future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke’s Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino’s of Plato in the fteenth.”3 Why should the West, dominated to the extent it currently is by scientic modes of thought, go to school to a perspective forged before the rise of modern science? Some think the answer lies in the extent to which the Buddhist cosmology anticipated what contemporary science has empirically discovered. The parallels are impressive. Astronomical time and space, which irrevocably smashed the West’s previous worldview, slip into the folds of Buddhist cosmology without a ripple. If we turn from macrocosm to microcosm, from the innite to the innitesimal, we nd the same uncanny prescience. While the Greeks were positing atoms that were eternal because not composite (a-tomas—indivisible, that which cannot be cut), Buddhists were teaching that everything corporeal is impermanent (anicca) because constituted of dharmas as miniscule in duration as they are in space—remarkably like the eeting blips that particles register on the scientists’ oscilloscopes. To return for a moment to the macrocosm, it is not just the dimensions of the scientic cosmology that Buddhism previsioned, but its form as well. We have become familiar with the debate between George Gamow’s “big bang” and Fred Hoyle’s “steady state” cosmogonies, the rst arguing that the universe is the continuing consequence of the explosion of a single primeval atom; the second, that the universe has always been in the state in which we know it, fresh hydrogen being continuously created to replace that which is being emptied out through the stars’ recession once they exceed the speed of light.